eBook Slavery and Freedom in Delaware, 1639-1865 ePub

Delaware is a unique state. I know having been born there and spent my adult life there. Small, independent yet tied to tradition. Democrat and Republican mean nothing except as names. Democrats act like Republicans in voting and Republicans act like, well I just don't know.

In ante-bellum times Democrats were like todays Republicans, pro-slavery because it was good for business. Upstate was anti-slavery due to Quaker influences and because slaves were few due to the type of crops grown. Downstate Delaware owned most of the slaves and did not want to free them until forced to. It was a complicated economic issue and Methodism waxed and waned in it's anti-slavery stance: first it was strongly anti-slavery and then lukewarm.

If Delaware had voted to accept Lincoln's offer to pay each slave owner much more than market price for their slaves (thereby freeing them) the Civil War may have been avoided. That vote failed by one vote (actually was never taken because it would have failed). That failure and the Civil War should be on Delaware's conscience.

Because Delaware touches Pennsylvania, a free state, many slaves from Delaware and other nearby slave states, fled through the state on the Underground Railroad to freedom. We'll never know all the stories of success and failure, life and death.

This book brings extremely important information together that would otherwise be nearly impossible to access.
One interesting factoid: Upon Emancipation slaves chose their last name (for the first time) and almost unanimously did not choose their owners name, instead chose another "white" last name. I don't know why I found this so interesting but I do.

It is a sad time in our country's history and we have never yet "repaired" the wrongs of a people forced into slavery.
Delaware is a microcosm of early America, split between North and South in the Civil War and not much different today in it's attitudes toward people of color, north and south.

Many of the references cited were not accurate they were an opinion of the citation not a fact from citation. There is much to be gleaned but you have to follow the entire way back for references because of the opinions used as fact thing.

I shared this book with our local high school,

Love it because it references an ancestor I was searching for.

Slavery took place in Delaware while its men fought with the North during the Civil War. While most blacks in Delaware experienced a degree of freedom, there were still a large number of closely guarded and controlled slaves kept by owners in the state. This scholarly, sometimes data-heavy book recalls the rarely-examined and somehow contradictory life of slaves from the time of Dutch colonization to the end of the Civil War, using historical records including family records, financial reports, bills of sale and the words of free, indentured or enslaved blacks from the period. This is an important work that illuminates an issue of war that was far more complicated than the uniform subjugation of a race. It talks the lives of people under sometimes conflicting laws within a neutral state with southern heritage and northern leanings, with die-hard abolitionists and powerful businessmen who required slaves to keep their businesses running and, in turn, the Delaware economy moving. Many of the great national issues that tore the country apart during this period are experienced and dealt with in the microcosm that is the First State. This book is a necessary part of understanding Black History in America and I strongly recommend you read it.